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What would you do? High Magic Campaign


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You have a High Magic Campaign where Common magics for NPCs are Shrinking & Growth (10 inches to 4 Meters), teleportation once a day up to 40 meters, and invisibility once a day.    How would you defend your homes, castiles, lands, country, etc.  from thieves, soldiers, etc. that would be invading, breaking in, etc?  What kind of traps would you build?  What type of magics would you place to keep things safe?  Thanks for the ideas and help.

 

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For a game I recently had to come up with magical defences for the palace of the RajadiRaja of a country that bordered a realm ruled by rakshasa. So the palace needed to be rakshasa proof. It's a Pathfinder game, so rakshasa are masters of shape changing, illusion and deception. Some can teleport. Coincidentally, there was also possibility of the heroes breaking into the palace and stealing a very valuable artifact; the Idol of the Dawn, which was the matching piece to the Idol of the Dusk that they had acquired (cough, cough) earlier.

 

The main thing  to consider would counter the effectiveness of these abilities is that, since everyone can do this magic, everyone is aware of it and has a heightened awareness of the trouble that can be caused. No one is fooled for a moment when an invisible or tiny  person tries a prank or someone teleports through their door.. No one is taken aback when an enemy suddenly grows to 4m tall, they simply grow 4m tall too and attack.

 

For castles/homes:

 

Walls built with the advantage Cannot Be Escaped With Teleport. This is admittedly my own house rule interpretation. Technically it's an advantage for Entangles but I see no reason not to use it for barriers if that's what you want. It stops people teleporting through them. Can be countered with Armour Piercing teleport.

 

Rats in the sewers. Magically enhanced guard rats. With lasers. Or similar beasties of your own fiendish design. Also, your human(ish?) guards can shrink and patrol the sewers too. Clearly this is punishment duty.

 

Guard dogs (or whatever) trained to react to the scent of things that they can't see.

 

Invisibility and/or Shrinking suppression/dispel/detection fields at important junctions. (expensive on points.) And guards there too.

 

All sorts of alarm and trap spells on valuable items. The traps should be of the non-explosive sort, no sense destroying that priceless painting with your own fireball trap. Or setting fire to the castle/house for that matter. I had mental domination spells that would instruct the target to behave normally until all their friends were asleep then to return to the palace and tell the guards everything about the theft. Again, expensive on points.

 

Guards (maybe only patrol leaders) with helmets of See Invisible and/or True Seeing (a high level spell that sees through all illusions and shape changes.)

 

Fake mouse holes (or similar) that are actually traps. Spikey traps.

 

For the country at large there's not much to be done to prevent incursions.

 

Choke points can be by-passed by tiny, invisible, or teleporting enemies. Bridges and can be ignored as people cross rivers at other points. Unless there is a massive population density someone can just keep moving along as a tiny person without ever being seen by anyone. They move relatively slowly (or not, reduced movement may or may not be a side effect of shrinking) but they get there eventually. Even armies can move relatively quietly through enemy territory.

 

Aerial patrols, only a few metres above the ground, could help spot large bodies of troops. Think shrunken soldiers on trained hawks.

 

Other than that, awareness, awareness, awareness. Of course how much time people bother spending being paranoid depends on the setting.

 

 

 

 

Edited by drunkonduty
for grammar
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If Teleport once per day and growth-shrinking is common it could go two ways. One require the growth for entry (so that all may see you and evidence of your passing, and requiring the extra strength to lift the the lids of domiciles, or climb ove obstacles to  gain entry.   Teleport is all fine and good, but  depending on the special effect of the teleports, such things as uneven floor and ceiling height could cause problems (I remember some Star Trek personnel were worried about blind transporter uses for the same reason.  Teleport without N-Ray vision could be hazardous  For soldiers that shrink or grow,  the response to that would be AOE spells of some lethality or duration.  Maybe an inexpensive solution to teleports would be a household Idol, one gives thanks, (END) every morning or every evening to power an AOE No teleport zone, or no Magic zone.  I can see merchants of shops with non magical items using things like these to protect their stock.  Even an idol with Magic suppression  where no magic can by used within the radius might be useful for the shop owners that do Traffic in magic items, and may have a large fence back yard behind the shop out fo the radius for demonstrations and workshops, maybe.  The prevention of invisible intruders, may simply be trained dogs, that have trackiing scent, and targeting sense hearing.  Even if invisibility has additional sense group hearing, few buy invisibility to scent, or "Spirit sight" (i.e. what cats see, when you dont). So perhaps trained spirit sensing cats that yowl when an unfamiliar entity is within it's home territory.  There would be cultural changes because of this, to the point if a bard gives a particularly bad performance, the audience simply shouts up and turns invisible.  Women literally ghosting  their boorish date, when he looks away,  and people evaporating from arguments or boring conversations.  A Bar fight between two people that can grow to Two meters becomes as damaging to the economy as a localized riot.  Being tiny means you could be attacked by the neighbor's pets, or stepped on.  Merchants could build doll houses for tiny people to demonstrate what a full sized houe might be like for prospective home owners. Lots of possibillities, and it all depends on how far you want to push it.

 

 

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If magic-- particularly the growing /  shrinking thing-- are commonplace, then I'd find an aggressive dog that could do the same thing.  

 

if invisible to scent is common, then I guess I'd have to go with a few trip wires, too, to get the dog going in the right direction.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/8/2019 at 4:55 PM, Duke Bushido said:

If magic-- particularly the growing /  shrinking thing-- are commonplace, then I'd find an aggressive dog that could do the same thing.  

 

if invisible to scent is common, then I guess I'd have to go with a few trip wires, too, to get the dog going in the right direction.

 

 

So breeders of magic dogs would be a top profession, and a necessary one. Well high magic was required, might as well have talking dogs too. 

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On 5/7/2019 at 7:30 PM, drunkonduty said:

For castles/homes:

 

Walls built with the advantage Cannot Be Escaped With Teleport. This is admittedly my own house rule interpretation. Technically it's an advantage for Entangles but I see no reason not to use it for barriers if that's what you want. It stops people teleporting through them. Can be countered with Armour Piercing teleport.

 

That is not an interpretation, that is in the rules.

6e1, 302

Cannot Be Escaped With Teleportation (+¼):

Characters apply this Advantage to walls, Entangles, and other barriers to prevent characters from Teleporting through them. 

A character cannot Teleport through any barrier that Cannot Be Escaped With Teleportation unless he buys his Teleportation 

with the Advantage Armor Piercing. Characters may purchase Cannot Be Escaped With Teleportation multiple times to 

overcome Armor Piercing.

Other ideas:

Buy a teleport sense for the building and trigger attacks or XDM or growth on teleport.

If you want be nastier, shrink UAA and teleport into a prepared cage for them.

Minor transforms to be able to identify them or mark them as thieves.

 

You could also buy the advantage as one way (you can teleport in but not out) and make it difficult or hazardous to attempt to leave without keys or other items (magic passwords, pattern locks, mazes, pitfalls, etc.)

 

 

You could buy the building itself as invisible to sight from the outside (leave the fences and such visible) and have a method to enter or see through it.

You could also buy images against the common senses used to teleport to cause people to teleport into walls if they believe them.

You can buy the house as a base and give it a magical "minder" (AI) with appropriate defense mechanisms.

 

The ideas basically come down to:

Make it difficult to enter.

Make it difficult to find / target.

Make it painful to enter.

Make it difficult to exit.

 

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Have things scarier than giants around.

 

Have walls more than 40 metres outside the areas you want to secure. People can teleport in, but they are stuck in an outside courtyard.

 

Detection spells for magic (invisibility, shrinking and other stuff).

 

Suppression fields for magic. (Personal immunity for your own magic, naturally.)

 

You can't protect an entire country, or even your own lands, but homes and castles are another matter.

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I'm going to suggest more conventional defenses.

 

How common are these powers, and how exactly do they work?  So shrinking, can everybody do it, or is 1 in 100 considered "common"?  Can they shrink valuables as well, or not?  If a shrinking guy can go down to 4" tall, slip under a door, grow again, grab the gold, shrink with it, and then leave, that's different than if he can't shrink the treasure along with him.  If everybody can shrink, I'd just build my house for a 4" tall family.

 

Realistically, castle design (and wealthy home design) would just have tighter design standards.  You wouldn't have any gaps that a 4" person could slide between.  For invisible people, I'd suggest that secure hallways have several inches of sand on the ground.  If somebody walks down the hallway, you'd see their footprints.  Guard dogs would bark if they smelled something they couldn't see.  For teleporters, I'd put a fence more than 40 meters outside my castle.  Build the castle on a hill, and have the fence at the bottom going around it.

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6 hours ago, massey said:

For invisible people, I'd suggest that secure hallways have several inches of sand on the ground.  If somebody walks down the hallway, you'd see their footprints.  Guard dogs would bark if they smelled something they couldn't see.

 

The sand method only works when nobody else uses the area. Dogs are better.

Or things better than dogs. Some kind of demon-weasel, maybe.

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1 hour ago, assault said:

 

The sand method only works when nobody else uses the area. Dogs are better.

Or things better than dogs. Some kind of demon-weasel, maybe.

 

That's why I said secure corridors, not high traffic areas.  Your guards can carry a rake or something to even out the sand after they walk through.  You'd alter the internal design of your castle so that there were multiple secure passageways like that.

 

You could also have just more locked doors, with guards on the other side.  They won't open the door unless they look through the peephole and see a person there.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I would say that the concealment of valuables would be the way the culture would go.

Homes festooned with pots, leveled gardens, many boxes, homes with bags of flour or (sneezing/pepper)powder in the attic where a rope or sash could pull them down into a gravity feed shower for a room.

 

Hiding things would become an obsession or hidden panels for one man hidey holes.

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